In the L.A. Times‘s original article about Judge Kozinski’s controversial material, there were two things that really grabbed your attention. Things that made it sound like there was a connection between Kozinski’s material and the obscene material that was the subject of the trial.

One was the infamous reference to a video of a “half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal.” As we now know, this video was a humorous video that is on YouTube and has been shown on television.

The second disturbing thing was the paper’s statement: “There were also themes of defecation and urination, though they are not presented in a sexual context.”

I’ll grant you that if you parse the words very carefully, it says “themes” and not “depictions.” But I believe most casual readers interpreted that line as an assertion that the images depicted urination and defecation — albeit not in a sexual context.

A search for “themes of defecation and urination” coupled with the term “kozinski” yields 724 hits on Google.

Most sites that quoted the line were fairly appalled. I’d say the reaction of the person at this website would be pretty typical: “This sucker Is One Sick Puppy!” As a commenter at the widely read Defamer blog asked: “How could those NOT be presented in a sexual context?!”

I’ll tell you how.

I have now reviewed most of the material on the CD I received from Cyrus Sanai, and I can confirm what you had probably already guessed: that any references to urination or defecation on the server/website were humorous.

See, the newspaper told readers that the “themes of urination and defecation” were not presented in a sexual context. But the paper did not explain that these themes always appeared in a humorous context.

There is a tremendous difference between material that alludes to urination and defecation in a humorous context — “pee-pee/doo-doo” humor — and material that depicts urination and defecation in a non-humorous context.

Pee-pee/doo-doo humor is everywhere. By contrast, many folks would consider non-humorous depictions of urination or defecation to be perverted.

In my post that published some of the images from Kozinski’s server/website, I already presented one image that had a theme of defecation. Here it is again:

Another “image[] of defecation” is presented in this video from an Australian “funniest home videos” show. It shows a fully clothed woman showing the camera how a horse is so docile, you can even crawl through its legs. When she does, the horse defecates on her head. And the audience laughs. View that video, if you must, here.

And now for some examples of material with a theme of urination.

There is a file labeled “Women’s Bathroom” with this image:

There is a comedy skit from a television show in which men are standing at a urinal. You can’t see them below the waist. As the audience laughs, the men end up holding each other’s penises, to free up their hands to drink beer and smoke. View this silly video here.

The line about the “themes of urination and defecation,” together with the line about a “half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal,” certainly made it sound like the judge was presiding over a trial about bestiality and defecation, while possessing images that appeared to relate to the same topics.

That’s the conclusion I came to in my initial post:

[I]t’s hard to see how a judge who has depictions of defecation and “cavorting” suggestive of bestiality can preside over an obscenity trial featuring defecation and bestiality.

That’s what they wanted me to think. And it worked.

I’m so ashamed. After years of training myself not to trust a thing this newspaper says, I find myself accepting what they say as true.

If even I fell for it, what about the people out there who are even less suspicious and more gullible than I am?

But my complaint here is not limited to the paper’s outrageous distortion of the “urination and defecation” material.

It’s also the way the paper has caused that line to disappear from the online version of the story, without explanation.

It used to be there. The line still appears in the KTLA version of the story linked above.

But on the L.A. Times web site’s version, this line is Down the Memory Hole. Read the story. It’s not there. There’s no line to say that it was removed, or why.

Now, I assume that this is not nefarious. Probably, the original version of the article was published on the Web, and then it was edited for the newspaper, and some editor took out the line. Then the Web version of the story was edited to conform to the print version.

Which all sounds terribly proper and understandable — until you realize that the net effect is that the newspaper has simply disappeared any evidence that they ever published that line, without saying a word to explain it.

That’s not a responsible way to handle content — especially in a story as widely disseminated as this one was. Especially with a line that had as great an effect as this one had.

I think the paper needs to explain what happened here, and revise their procedures for altering online stories, to increase transparency.

And in the future, they need to be more careful about the clear implications of their language — especially when someone’s reputation is on the line.

P.S. I plan to do a post with a more comprehensive overview of the material on the CD I received. It will likely be published tomorrow.

100 Responses to “L.A. Times Said Kozinski Material Had “Themes of Urination or Defecation” But Never Explained Humorous Context — Plus, the Line Is Now Down the Memory Hole”

Patterico, Judge Kozinski has no better friend than you, even though you aren’t his friend in any meaningful sense. You are putting the facts out there for your readers to evaluate.

That lets us see past the innuendoes and cheap shots and implications of the L.A. Times and others. Yeah, Kozinski has a silly and sometimes raunchy sense of humor. But he’s been hung out to dry by the Times on this issue.

If the mainstream media would do this to Kozinski, they would do it to any of us. That’s the truth-in-advertising lede that should have accompanied the LAT’s Page One article.

The next self-pitying article about Hard Times in the Newspaper Industry that I read in the Columbia Journalism Review — I’ll think back to this sorry episode.

Everyone can listen to the “Which Way LA” radio program and judge for themselves if the LAT reporter is a snarky bitch. (and he is ostensibly a “man.”) So sad. Makes one long for the days when a reporter was a little more hardboiled – he’d call you whatever he’d call you to your face.

I struggle to find the right words to label what the reporter did – it was so incredibly ……small. He is a little, little man.

It’s great to have you out there deconstructing an overblown story, Patrick. Those media outlets who left out Kozinski’s side — that the images were in the realm of bad humor — could have figured it out with just a few minutes of work, and that includes the LA Times.
In some ways, the bigger story to me is that we in the media will now publish leaked information from somebody with a clear axe to grind, almost on the eve of a trial, and then not properly vet that info or describe it to readers — even though the source of the leak is himself a giant red flag. I suspect that the reason no other national or California journalists “bit” on Sanai’s attempt to leak the story earlier this year is because those other journalists soon realized that the imagery was derived from humor and not from creepy fetishes.

Kozinski told Glover he mistakenly thought that his site’s X-rated material, which Kozinski said was shared only with friends, was password-protected and inaccessible to the public. He downplayed the material as a humorous collection of salacious and vulgar odds and ends. And in fact, the explicit images tend toward spoofs and bad humor. The news, nevertheless, exploded into a national story. Kozinski suspended the trial for 48 hours, and on Friday faxed a 50-word announcement recusing himself and declaring a mistrial.

Two views of Kozinski quickly emerged. The first was that of a reckless pornbroker, a judge with a troublesome lack of trial experience whose vanity led him to this professional precipice (he once nominated himself in an online “Judicial Hottie Contest,” and his site posted a link — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdjCdbGucCU — to his appearance on a long-ago episode of The Dating Game).

But others argue that Kozinski’s online album was aimed at jokes, was not obscene and was only occasionally pornographic. His supporters say he was the victim of disgruntled attorney Cyrus Sanai, who was not connected with the case but was bent on trashing Kozinski because of the judge’s published remarks on a divorce case involving Sanai’s parents. Just before the Isaacs trial, Sanai leaked to the Times’ Glover a CD filled with images from the judge’s site. (Sanai told L.A. Weekly he’d been “shopping” the story since January to The Wall Street Journal, two legal newspapers — the Daily Journal and The Recorder — and the L.A. Times’ Henry Weinstein, who is no longer with that paper. Nobody bit — until the Times saw the CD the day before the jury was sworn in.)

“My views on pornography,” said Sanai, “are probably not very different from his. The difference is that I don’t put pictures of it on a Web site called CyrusSanai.com.”

Nevertheless, Sanai successfully tainted Kozinski using the country’s snickering preoccupation with sex, and the media’s urge to blow up any story with a whiff of it.

Just to be clear. You appear to be stating that the files “chinesemassproduction” and “bestwomandriver” (1) were resident on Kozinski’s server and (2) are clearly pornograhic.

Are you also stating (conceding?) that the material from the server that Patterico has posted to date is not pornography? Or is the point that they are, but that these two other files are even more so?

Lots of porn has a humorous or parodic element. That does not change its basic nature.

I would have to ask, which basic nature? That of pornography (literally, “writing about sex”), or that of humor or parody?

And if the judge is looking at it in such a way as to enjoy the humor or parody, rather than what you choose to see as “porn”, while your perceptions are diametrically opposite, why would yours be more correct, or even more mature?

Not trying to bust any balls here, but I’ve seen much worse on “America’s Funniest Home Videos”, and Judge Kosinski is pretty far over to the small-l “libertarian” side of the spectrum. If you disagree with his particular sense of humor, that’s one thing, but to judge his fitness to decide certain cases because of this locker-room-humor nonsense is really reaching.

That having been said, the attempts to overblow this by the media is just another case of “He’s been up on that pedestal long enough”, and are professionally reprehensible.

Apparently you are saying that chinesemassproduction is one of the two most pornographic files in Kozinski’s stuff directory.

As I pointed out yesterday:

Yahoo has about 150 sites with chinesemassproduction still including Kozinski’s stuff directory and the Photobucket albums for 2 or 3 other people. Anyone who wants to see how pornographic it is should do a search on Yahoo. When I tried a Google search, it did not show up.

The video has a hundred or more couples in a large room, in front of a large mirror, doubling the number of couples. Any adult would recognize that the couples are engaged in missionary position sexual intercourse.

It is not Chinese, but obviously a Japanese AV with the few visible genitals electronically scrambled. It is an audacious, stupid, crazy Japanese AV. It is not pornographic. The MPAA would rate it PG-13.

“Nacht und nebel.” We don’t know what you’re talking about. It never happened. You must be crazy. You must be imagining things. We write the history, and our history shows: It never happened, it didn’t exist.

If this judge is a conservative, then it might mean that the liberals specifically brought this case before the 9th Circuit realizing that they could create a controversy with what they knew the judge had on his website. They could calculate that it would create an equivalency dilemma that would either get the judge in serious trouble or sabotage the obscenity case. They win either way.

One just result from this dispiriting pseudo-scandal would be a further damaging of the LA Times’ reputation for veracity (and a corresponding collapse of its attempt to smear Judge Kozinski.)

Which is too bad for Sam Zell, who seems like an interesting and productive businessman. But he should have done greater due diligence before he bought this piece o’ crap newspaper. A newspaper’s greatest asset or liability is its staff, and a newspaper with people such as Glover and editor David Lauter isn’t worth a damn.

They’ve replaced the old story with a new story – it’s apparently a new article which re-uses parts of the old article.

This is mentioned in the text, though rather obscurely.

“After publication of an latimes.com article about his website Wednesday morning, …”

That latimes.com article of Wednesday morning (dated June 11) is the article with the “themes of defecation and urination” line. It’s been replaced by a *Thursday* article (dated June 12) which has many differences from the June 11 article.

It doesn’t seem nefarious, but rather I suspect that the website has to track the printed paper as a matter of policy.

Interestingly, right now the old article is still in the website’s search index, though not the URLs – see this search:

So it seems as if nobody is claiming that, as of today, Judge Kozinski’s family’s non-password-secured-private-use-server has been shown to have clear-cut, unambigous, explicit pornography hosted on it.

But tomorrow! Hoo boy, when you see the scurrilous stuff tomorrow, jeepers, are you gonna be shocked then!

In terms of the story that the LA Times has been pushing, reams-and-reams-of-hardcore-porno now seems to have slimmed down to two (2) files, “chinesemassproduction” and “bestwomandriver.” In #9, above, slp dismisses “chinesemassproduction.”

That leaves one (1) file for tomorrow, “bestwomandriver.”

That sure would have been a helluva Page One shocker: “Judge’s Poorly-Secured Family Server Includes a Bunch of Raunchy Videos Culled From YouTube and Other Places, Plus One (1) Clearly Explicit File.”

That‘s the sort of The Front Page journalism that’s sure to put a shine on the paper’s reputation. As if any were needed.

I think it’s interesting for several reasons. Lawyers may find it interesting because it involves a federal judge who is also the chief judge of a circuit court. That’s one step below the Supreme Court and Judge Kozinski regularly sends clerks to the Supreme Court. Those facts make him of special interest to me.

Another reason that this story is interesting, and perhaps the most important reason from the standpoint of of this blog, is that it raises questions about the way the LA Times report stories of local and national interest. The LA Times led this story so if there are reasons to be concerned about its reporting, that affects our understanding of this case and public opinion in general.

In all likelihood, if Patterico hadn’t raised these issues then only the parties directly involved would have spoken out. I, for one, am glad Patterico is willing to spend his time looking into cases like this. I’m also glad that others like him are thinking about the stories that other newspapers and media sources publish. The public and the media will be better off as a result.

#22
Okay DRJ. If you say so. Just that I felt this Cyrus guy seems to be the one trying to keep this alive. Dont be surprised if that CD turns out to be another hoax. If he was on to something serious and really scandalous he would have brought it out by now. But then I could be wrong.

Ditto the kudos. Thanks, Patterico, for keeping abreast of all of this. (To Mr. Sanai – there is nothing pornographic about the previous sentence. Calm down.)

True. Sanai puts pictures of it on a website and calls it “LookAtWhatJudgeKozinskiDid!!!.com”

Dishonorable scum.

Let me get this straight. When AK sees toilet humour and chucks it into the digital equivalent of a drawer full of odds and ends, he is somehow more demented than Sanai, who sees dirty, dirty sex everywhere he looks.

Now, it’s been a long weekend. Bar studying – and too much sunshine – is frying my brain. Would someone please explain this to me?

chesemassproduction is extremely easy to find on the internet. It’s not PG-13… it’s rated R, though it’s very mild compared to normal internet porn, it is porn. It’s tame and I see no problem with it whatsoever. Cyrus describes the mild porn as ‘indefensible’, though it’s really just stuff that requires no defense because it’s basic porn with no taboo beyond the sex. You can find the file easily.

I actually laughed at it months ago when I saw it. I can totally see this being saved for humor, though I doubt very much that Kozinski had ever seen this file before Cyrus’s attack.

This approach has been a regular feature of liberal politics in recent years – you can make virtually any accusation in the media, no matter how salacious, and get away with it. If you can enlist the support of a friendly media outlet, so much the better. It doesn’t have to be true. By the time it’s debunked, the election’s over.

I don’t get this defense of Kozinski. If a white man had these things hanging on his locker at an auto plant, his coworker can claim sexual hostile work environment which would result in HIS FIRING. Check the case law. Why is a judge allowed to find priest pedophilia a funny topic? Most Americans, outside of San Francisco, consider it racially and morally offensive. If we can’t have any depiction of Allah, we sure as heck can’t have Catholic Priest being shown forcing a CHILD to preform oral sex. Help me, please, because I side with the LA Times. This guy Kozinski is a complete baffoon.

In the (not so) good days, guys like Kozinski would have been patted on the back and handed a cigar by his male cronies while some submissive female brought ’round their drinks and ignored their low-brow sexual comments for fear of losing her job.

Help you, Karen? Somebody’s interest in raunchy humor disqualifies him from his job?

“Why is a judge allowed to find priest pedophilia a funny topic?”

Do you really mean that? Do you think that someone ought to be precluded from considering something as he does?

I’ll tell you what, Karen: I’m a rather devout Catholic (not exactly Anchoress quality), and I’m not offended by mockery directed at priestly sex abuse, as in my view it deserves to be savaged. If people think that that’s the way the majority of them are, then that is an ignorance that they choose, and I pity them for their hatred. I am as disgusted by the exemptions afforded Islam by the politically correct as you are. But I fear that despite certain affinities you are a decidedly prim and censorious type who thinks that her own view of what constitutes obscenity ought to be imposed upon others.

Please enjoy your puritanism. But if you wish to defend your view, you might begin by demonstrating just how similar a person’s apparently personal computer files and his locker at the workplace are. We’ll take it from there.

If a white man had these things hanging on his locker at an auto plant, his coworker can claim sexual hostile work environment which would result in HIS FIRING. Check the case law.

Well, he would be fired because he would be creating a hostile work environment. Now, I know Kozinski works his clerks pretty hard, but, unless you know something we don’t know, he never forced them to take up residence inside his family’s desktop computer server. Critical distinction there.

Karen, JBrealt, your reactions are just ridiculous and appear to have nothing to do with the reality. As mentioned before, this stuff was not at the work place. This material is quite unoffensive compared to the bulk of stuff that people are sharing as humorous via email etc. on a daily basis.

Yes. I am seriously expecting that, Brault. All humor is transgressive somehow. Early in our occupation of Afghanistan someone called in a bombing on what turned out to be a group of wedding celebrators firing off guns. It was a terrible thing, but I remember thinking, “What’s the big deal? It’s not as though most Americans have never been bombed at a wedding reception.”

I realize that this makes me an evil, spiteful, hateful person who should be sent away to a prison colony forever, but that’s what I thought. Also, I thought it was funny.

Oh, please. Drunk humor jokes regarding a wedding is a far, far stretch from finding a rape/sexual assault against a child funny. That is just a desperate attempt on your part to attach brevity to a disgusting topic.

Tell it to the families of abused kids – see how much they laugh, idiot.

How far have we come with the thought police in public discourse? Here we have Karen and JBrault repeatedly defending the excoriation of a judge 1) not for displaying bias towards pedophilia, mysoginistic tendencies, bestiality, or scatological obsessions in one of his cases, 2) not for publicly calling for leniency in sentencing or treatment of pedophiles, zoophiles, sexual harassers, or sexual deviants, 3) not for advocating the widespread dissemination and viewing of pornography, 4) not for beloging to an organization which publicly advocates on behalf of sexists or deviants, and 5) not for subjecting his coworkers and subordinates to sexual, scataological or mysoginistic behavior, BUT FOR joking about these topics with private people outside of work. The thought crime of enjoying jokes about these subjects and expressing that enjoyment outside of work to friends and family makes people fear that he secretly harbors prurient, scatological, sexist or other agendas which he will then zealously insert into his work as a judge.

So without one shred of proof that his enjoying jokes about these subjects affects his work in any way, he’s been the subject of a public reproval in the papers and been forced to recuse himself from a case (at a fair amount of taxpayer expense) and subject himself to an ethics review (at even more taxpayer expense). Just the mere possibility that he finds humor with some of the subjects is enough for JBrault and others to view him as unfit for the bench.

Guess what, JBrault and Karen, there are more people out there like Kozinski than there are like you. You’re going to continue to be disappointed by people in both the public and private sectors who perform their jobs competently and without bias and yet, in their private lives, occasionally find humor in subjects you don’t agree with or find distasteful. And yes, the fact that grown men who purport to aspire to live lives without sin and to be the physcial embodiment of a deity also feel the unsuppressable need to molest young boys to get sexual satisfaction is both horribly tragic and incredibly hilarious.

You’re going to continue to be disappointed by people in both the public and private sectors who perform their jobs competently and without bias and yet, in their private lives, occasionally find humor in subjects you don’t agree with or find distasteful.

JRD – please don’t tell them that some very well-respected people have woman-on-top sex. It might blow their minds to know that perfectly decent children were conceived without the missionary position. 😉

No – but there’s a time and a place for everything. That place is never a bunk bed, that time is never after a panoply of other conquests, and that everything is a bit (or a lot) more romantic.

I’m a girl. So sue me.*

*Disclaimer to those who are prone to excessive, frivolous, and vexful litigation: the above was meant as humour and sarcasm; and should not be taken literally, as an invitation to snoop about the writer’s bedside table, Bibles, computer, or DBV (dearly beloved Volvo); nor to harass, irritate, or litigate against the writer.

Story time! Let me grab some chocolate and settle down for this one. It ought to be good.

In my own defence – DBV has a “Republican Party of San Diego County” sticker on the back (yes, I put it there; no, there are no “Coexist” or “Gore 2000″ stickers on it, either), is approaching its quarter-million mile anniversary, is really freakin’ safe, and, unlike most cars on the market, lacks an assault of electronic components that makes DIY car maintenance nearly impossible.

Oh, yeah, and my skis fit in the trunk and poke through to the backseat. Clearly, nk lacks an appreciation of alpine sports. 😉

no sign of cyrus the stalker today, but on june 15 he was named “iranian of the day” on http://www.iranian.com. directly below the post honoring him is a comically anti-semitic post on judge kozinski “yiddish judge screws america”. how do you explain something like that to clients in beverly hills?

I probably won’t pass the bar, but I may as well study for it – the legal equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, if you will.

I assumed that from “post-bar”, you meant “after I take the bar”, yes?

Kick butt on it, eh? It’s entirely possible that at some point I will require quality legal representation, and it seems all the lawyers around here that are work anything either prosecute, or don’t do criminal law…

I dunno, but I’d be willing to copy it to a big sign and stand infront of his law-office to find out…

Ya know, Sanai isn’t very big on First Amendment rights, and probably wouldn’t take kindly to that. You would wake up at 3 am to find him rummaging about your dresser drawers, looking for copies of Penthouse and Hustler.

Ya know, Sanai isn’t very big on First Amendment rights, and probably wouldn’t take kindly to that. You would wake up at 3 am to find him rummaging about your dresser drawers, looking for copies of Penthouse and Hustler.

That would be silly…

I keep all that stuff on my web serv.. Oh-ho-ho, you almost got me there…

Hey, he posted it, I’m just sharing his wisdom with anyone walking into his office…

good luck on the bar exam bridget. i probably won’t pass the bar is a defeatist attitude. i’m assuming this is the california bar exam, most difficult in the country, the other states are a piece of cake. look at some of the california lawyers you hear about in the news, you know you have to be smarter than they are. when i did it in 1980, i found that bar review lectures are a waste of time, but the outlines were helpful, just read them over and over in a quiet spot like your backyard until the big three days. it’s a mental game that the calm, confident and psychologically prepared win, not necessarily the ones with the most legal knowledge. the worst part is the 4+ months of waiting for the results afterward, but you’ll get through that too. you can do this.

Indeed, ADA, when my wife took the California bar for the first time, she told me that if she did not think she did well the first day, she’d call me to pick her up ( she was booked into the hotel at the exam site ). That the first time was a “freebie”.

I firmly told her that she could call, but I would not pick her up. That she should plan on doing all three days, and if she did not feel she did well on the first day, she had to throw it off and do better the rest of the exam.

That’s all you need, Scott, a California lady lawyer who drives a Volvo. Just go on up to Milwaukee and buy yourself a Harley and on your way back stop to talk to an apple-cheeked, freckled, Wisconsin farm girl who drives a five-ton produce truck.

See, the thing is, I started studying for the bar in mid-June. Before that, my life was occupied with other things – like a zillion research assistantships, teaching, graduating, moving, and all that fun stuff. I nudged my bar books around my bedroom floor for a while, and hoped that the nudging might shake some knowledge loose that would then float into my brain.

I’m still hoping that, in light of the Sanai debacle, the California board of bar examiners will meet us all on the first day of the exam and say, “Considering we let that guy in, we cannot, in good conscience, exclude any of you. Sign your name on the paper, mosey over to Disney, and be at the swearing-in ceremony in November.”

Six weeks. Maybe five. It’s at the end of July (29th, 30th, 31st, IIRC).

There is no “focus.” I’m learning stuff that I already learned, except they took out the parts involving foxes, chickens, or barrels of flour that fall out of windows – you know, the things that make law school more fun.